Nine Lives

A bad movie is worst when you can sense the meaningful intentions of its creators. Such it is with Rodrigo García’s Nine Lives, the sins of which increase scene by scene to jaw-droppingly hysterical heights even as it solemnly professes to address and sum up the numerous trials of the human heart. The film’s first sequence forewarns of the idiocy to follow as Los Angeles County prison inmate Sandra (Elpidia Carillo) sniffs n’ shrieks her way into a frenzied display of mother-love because a defective phone is preventing her from speaking to her young daughter. It all plays as a peculiarly off-putting and histrionic sort of Hispanic mélo that would be out of place on even the most dreadful telenovela (terrible because of how damned inconsequential it all feels) and it’s made all the worse due to Nine Lives’ central conceit of showing nine uninterrupted moments in the lives of nine women via nine uninterrupted long takes.

Nine times three is 27, which is about the number of times I stooped my head in shame during this debacle. It takes a special kind of talent to waste a cast this diverse (the results suggest that few, if any of them, should try their hand at theater) and García has that talent in his blood. He’s the son of the great novelist Gabriel García Márquez and there are moments in Nine Lives, few and far between, that might have come from early drafts of Love in the Time of Cholera. Minor signs of improvement and purpose flicker like so many Platonic shadows through the film’s second and third sequences. In the former, Robin Wright Penn and Jason Isaacs play ex-lovers, now both remarried, who run into each other at a grocery store, the emotional high point coming when Isaacs impulsively kisses Penn’s pregnant belly. In the latter, a distraught Lisa Gay Hamilton comes home after a long absence to confront her deadbeat stepfather (Miguel Sandoval, who’s unfortunately forced to break the law of diminishing returns by revealing the film’s Short Cuts/Magnolia/Crash-inspired L.A. interconnection structure) and there’s an evocative passage, photographed in slight overexposure, where she regresses to a childlike state while running around the backyard.

But those warning bells go off again when one recognizes that the character’s sister is played—in a stroke of pious meta-pomo obviousness—by Sidney Poitier’s daughter, and by the time the scene climaxes with Hamilton fellating a gun that never goes off it’s clear we’re stuck on a quickly sinking ship of fools. From thereon any pleasure to be derived from Nine Lives is solely of the “how much worse can this thing get?” variety and I have to give the film credit…it really does get a whole lot worse. A scene in which creepy character actor du jour William Fichtner (playing deaf with subtitles, no less!) signs his desire to fuck ex-wife Amy Brenneman practically redefines the term “embarrassment of riches,” its high/low point coming when he offers to our lady of perpetual rom-com befuddlement that “I masturbate thinking about you.” (Uh…ewww!)

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